O'Reilly Network Weblogs: Digg Vulnerable to XSS

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Digg Vulnerable to XSS

by Nitesh Dhanjani
Nov. 23, 2005

While trying to use the ‘search’ feature on Digg, I realized that it is vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS). The search string is echoed back without proper output encoding. Example:

http://digg.com/search?search=%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27vulnerable%20to%20xss%27%29%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E&submit=Submit

I haven’t checked to see if the comments or new story submission modules are affected – if they are, things could get pretty messy. I have contacted the Digg team about this, lets hope they fix it soon.

Update: They fixed it this morning.

Nitesh Dhanjani is a well known security researcher, author, and speaker.